Hope Is a Garden
In a culture that is all about more more more, it took reading Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown to make me reevaluate my relationship with enough. Yes, I agreed with ideas around degrowth and sufficiency, but I still fell into mental traps of trying to maximize art making time or planting an ever increasing amount of garlic. It turns out you can have too much garlic, just like you can have too much time in the studio. Unfortunately, figuring out what is enough is harder than simply maximizing a given quantity. While I haven’t figured out the optimal amount of studio time, I am close to finding the optimal amount of garlic to plant so that we never have to buy it, can eat as much of it as we want, and don’t begin summer with sad-looking extras bound for the compost. Four rows doesn’t look like quite enough, so five rows of garlic is my new estimate, and let’s hope I don’t have to adopt garlic from my parents again next year.